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Blockchains and Bitcoins

Before we are start, the common misunderstanding is that these are terms for the same things – they are not. More of that to come

Blockchain has some rather superfluous statements; such as “The Great economic leveller”
Silicon Valley investor Marc Andreessen calls it “one of the most fundamental inventions in the history of computer science”, while the World Economic Forum’s Klaus Schwab describes it as “being at the heart of the fourth industrial revolution.” Last year, almost half a billion dollars was invested in VC-backed blockchain companies

Let’s start at the beginning…
a Ledger is THE system of record for all businesses. Typically a business will have multiple ledgers based on the different networks they participate in. In a global (or even regional) market place, there will be a whole network of transactions between organisations. This is very similar to the IT problem of point to point networks creating a huge amount of both over complexity, inefficiency, and of course increase in vulnerabilities. The response to this problem is Blockchain; removing point to point transactions and replacing with a shared, replicated and permissioned network. Blockchain is the shared ledger technology, allowing any participant in the business network to see the ledger
Well that sounds relatively easy…

Here is a more technical summary:
“The Blockchain combines cryptography & distributed computing to deliver secure, direct, peer to peer transactions without the need for a central party. At its heart is the Distributed Ledger. This is a tamper proof, public [or private], network-hosted, record of all consensus verified transactions. Initially realised via Bitcoin and similar ‘cryptocurrencies’, focus & investment is now shifting to the potential of Blockchain technology to revolutionise the infrastructure and processes of established Financial Institutions & other enterprises.” –First Partner

Blockchain has a number of core dimensions – all of which are fundamental to its success:
– the transaction: for example an asset transfer
– the contract: the conditions for the transaction (contractual terms can of course range from simple payment through to very complex conditions)
– privacy – ensuring appropriate visibility, security, authentication, and verifiable
– consensus – all parties agreeing to the verified transaction

So, I started this discussion around Blockchain and Bitcoins. What are Bitcoins? The negative connotation to them is that they are unregulated, censorsorship resistant shadow currency. This was the first blockchain application . (http://www.coindesk.com/bitcoin-explained-five-year-old/) Many people buy Bitcoins for speculation -betting on the price going up. There is also an interesting phenonma in Bitcoins:
Currently, 25 bitcoins are created every ten minutes. On 11 July 2016, this number will drop to 12.5. Then, four years after that, it will half again. Why is this happening? There are roughly 15.5 million bitcoins in existence and the halving process means that the total can never exceed 21 million, expected to occur roughly a century from now. That’s all locked down in the code. The ownership (the holding) of a bitcoin is stored on the blockchain public ledger. The reason its called a block chain is that the transaction is recorded each time in a new data layer known as a block. Bitcoins don’t have serial numbers, they have provenance. The blockchain has more than 5000 identical copies – truly open source
There are about 200k transactions a day using Bitcoin- very small compared with Visa/Mastercard but nonetheless is gaining popularity.
Current price (Nov 2016) of a bitcoin is $732 making the network total value $15bn. (http://www.coindesk.com/bitcoin-breaches-750-struggles-set-new-2016-high/#)

Buying a bitcoin. It may seem a little antiquated, but I actually like the idea of going to an an ATM to purchase a bitcoin. (https://coinatmradar.com/) (editor note : not plucked up the courage yet…)

On the Technology side, checkout the Hyper ledger Project – on Dockerhub. Not surprisingly, all public cloud providers (AWS, Azure, IBM) all have block chain service